Search results for ""kant""

Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five texts on art written by twenty philosophers. Covering the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays draw on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and psychoanalytic theory, and each is accompanied by an overview and interpretation. The volume features Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh's shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dali's The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud's postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want elucidates these texts with essays on aesthetics, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and Ranciere, demonstrating how philosophy adopted a new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant's powerful legacy.

Read more less

Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five texts on art written by twenty philosophers. Covering the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays draw on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and psychoanalytic theory, and each is accompanied by an overview and interpretation. The volume features Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh's shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dali's The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud's postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want elucidates these texts with essays on aesthetics, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and Ranciere, demonstrating how philosophy adopted a new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant's powerful legacy.

Read more less

This book argues that Kant’s theory of international relations should be interpreted as an attempt to apply the principles of reason to history in general, and in particular to political conditions of the late eighteenth century. It demonstrates how Kant attempts to mediate between a priori theory and practice, and how this works in the field of international law and international relations. Kant appreciates how the precepts of theory have to be tested against the facts, before the theory is enriched to deal with the complexities of their application. In the central chapters of this book, the starting points are apparent contradictions in Kant’s writings; assuming that Kant is a systematic and profound thinker, Cavallar seeks to use these contradictions to discover Kant’s ‘deep structure’, a dynamic and evolutionary theory that tries to anticipate a world where the idea of international justice might be more fully realized.

Read more less

Presents Nietzsche's Zarathustra as a moral tyrant whose ethics are more exacting than the Christian morals they are intended to supplant Identifies and critiques the four key strands of Nietzsche's ethics of self-overcoming Unmasks the 'moralism' behind Nietzsche's self-professed 'immoralism' Furthers research on the intellectual parallels between Nietzsche and Kant and between Nietzsche and Hegel The first critical work to discern affinities between Nietzsche and Feuerbach on the subject of love, sacrifice and a higher humanity By way of a sustained interrogation of Zarathustra's doctrine of self-overcoming, Francesca Cauchi lays bare the asceticism underlying the prescriptive injunctions set forth in the first two parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. These injunctions fall under three heads: self-legislation, self-denial and self-sacrifice, which are shown to bear striking affinities with concepts first formulated by Kant, Hegel and Feuerbach, respectively. In Cauchi's new reading, the Kantian rational will, the Hegelian 'labour of the negative' and Feuerbach's indivisible trinity of love, sacrifice and suffering are seen to resurface in Zarathustra as the agents of a ferocious and self-eviscerating doctrine of self-overcoming that exhibits all the attributes of a moral tyranny.

Read more less

In the prevailing account of English empiricism, Locke conceived of self-understanding as a matter of mere observation, bound closely to the laws of physical perception. English Romantic poets and German critical philosophers challenged Locke's conception, arguing that it failed to account adequately for the power of thought to turn upon itself-to detach itself from the laws of the physical world. Cathy Caruth reinterprets questions at the heart of empiricism by treating Locke's text not simply as philosophical doctrine but also as a narrative in which "experience" plays an unexpected and uncanny role. Rediscovering traces and transformations of this narrative in Wordsworth, Kant, and Freud, Caruth argues that these authors must not be read only as rejecting or overcoming empirical doctrine but also as reencountering in their own narratives the complex and difficult relation between language and experience. Beginning her inquiry with the moment of empirical self-reflection in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding-when a mad mother mourns her dead child-Caruth asks what it means that empiricism represents itself as an act of mourning and explores why scenes of mourning reappear in later texts such as Wordsworth's Prelude, Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, and Freud's Civilization. From these readings Caruth traces a recurring narrative of radical loss and the continual displacement of the object or the agent of loss. In Locke it is the mother who mourns her dead child, while in Wordsworth it is the child who mourns the dead mother. In Kant the father murders the son, while in Freud the sons murder the father. As she traces this pattern, Caruth shows that the conceptual claims of each text to move beyond empiricism are implicit claims to move beyond reference. Yet the narrative of death in each text, she argues, leaves a referential residue that cannot be reclaimed by empirical or conceptual logic. Caruth thus reveals, in each of these authors, a tension between the abstraction of a conceptual language freed from reference and the compelling referential resistance of particular stories to abstraction.

Read more less

The birth of the Enlightenment heralded a new reverence for the power of reason. But as science flourished in Europe, violence and brutality did not abate. In the French Revolution, thousands were guillotined and the death toll was vast. Philosophers asked whether we had become dehumanised by rationality and abstract political theory. Did art and literature provide a way to rediscover our soul and our compassion? Or could art be corrupted just as easily, used as propaganda to justify abhorrent acts? In this masterful survey of European aesthetics over the last two hundred years, philosopher Robert L. Wicks argues that it is this tension between creativity and rationality that has characterised debate in the subject. Presenting the theories of sixteen seminal thinkers, including Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, and Derrida, European Aesthetics shows how each philosopher’s theory of art was motivated by broader topics in their thought, concerning who we are and what a good society should resemble. With colour photographs and written in a lively but objective tone, Wicks analyses important pieces of art, makes critical comparisons between thinkers, and offers a bold conclusion on our contemporary aesthetic situation. In an internet age, where we are presented with endless opportunity, but also startling existential questions, this is the definitive account of the evolution of continental thought in this hugely relevant and exciting area of philosophy.

Read more less

Es el mundo un cosmos o un caos? Tiene sentido la historia humana? Y si lo tiene, cuál es? Es el hombre libre y responsable de sus actos o un simple fragmento del universo determinado por las rígidas leyes de la naturaleza? Puede darnos certezas la ciencia? Qué es la verdad? Cuáles son los fundamentos de la democracia? La historia de la filosofía es la historia de los problemas filosóficos, de las teorías filosóficas y de las argumentaciones filosóficas. Es la historia de los intentos siempre nuevos de plantear cuestiones con la esperanza de poder saber cada vez más sobre nosotros mismos y de hallar orientaciones para nuestra vida. Giovanni Reale y Dario Antiseri, inspirándose en criterios epistemológicos y pedagógicos, ofrecen en esta obra una exposición poderosamente didáctica de la historia de la filosofía: a la exposición analítica de los problemas y de las ideas de los diferentes filósofos anteponen una síntesis de las ideas tratadas, concebida como una ayuda para la memorización;

Read more less

Frontier: the border between two countries; the limits of civilization; the bounds of established knowledge; a new field of activity. At a time when all borders, boundaries, margins, and limits are being—often violently—challenged, erased, or reinforced, we must rethink the concept of frontier itself. But is there even such a concept? Through an original and imaginative reading of Kant, Geoffrey Bennington casts doubt upon the conceptual coherence of borders. The frontier is the very element of Kant’s thought yet the permanent frustration of his conceptuality. Bennington brings out the frontier’s complex, abyssal, fractal structure that leaves a residue of violence in every frontier and complicates Kant’s most rational arguments in the direction of cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace. Neither a critique of Kant nor a return to Kant, this book proposes a new reflection on philosophical reading, for which thinking the frontier is both essential and a recurrent, fruitful, interruption.

Read more less

The Critique of Pure Reason Kant's First Critique is one of the most studied texts in intellectual history, but as Alfredo Ferrarin points out in this radically original book, most of that study has focused only on very select parts. Likewise, Kant's oeuvre as a whole has been compartmentalized, the three Critiques held in rigid isolation from one another. Working against the standard reading of Kant that such compartmentalization has produced, The Powers of Pure Reason explores forgotten parts of the First Critique in order to find an exciting, new, and ultimately central set of concerns by which to read all of Kant's works. Ferrarin blows the dust off of two egregiously overlooked sections of the First Critique the Transcendental Dialectic and the Doctrine of Method. There he discovers what he argues is the Critique's greatest achievement: a conception of the unity of reason and an exploration of the powers it has to reach beyond itself and legislate over the world. With this in mind, Ferrarin dismantles the common vision of Kant as a philosopher writing separately on epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics and natural teleology, showing that the three Critiques are united by this underlying theme: the autonomy and teleology of reason, its power and ends. The result is a refreshing new view of Kant, and of reason itself.

Read more less

Immanuel Kant, the Prussian thinker at the forefront of the German Enlightenment, decisively shaped what is arguably the central philosophical legacy of his era, a legacy of critical rationality and ethico-political self-determination. In ""Philosophical Legacies"", Daniel O. Dahlstrom brings exceptional scholarship to an examination of the diversity and lasting influence not only of Kant but also of some of his most prominent contemporary critics.Dahlstrom makes a thorough study of various authors such as Johan Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Friedrich Schiller, and later Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He shows that the legacy of German Idealism remains undeniably relevant today. He examines diverse aspects of these philosophers' legacies - legacies which continue to find their way into contemporary philosophical debates.Among the many topics Dahlstrom discusses are the relation of science to ethics and the different modes and conditions of knowledge. He also considers the nature and legitimate reach of aesthetics; the ends of history and art; the place of conscience in ethical life; the religious significance of philosophy and art, and the political potential of art; the roots of ethics in sexual life; the morality of equal opportunity; and the speculative idea of a philosophical responsibility that cannot be deferred.The essays trace carefully the histories of the influences of earlier thinkers and their legacies upon later thinkers. But the essays engage these histories with a view to indicating, and in some cases critically weighing, the significance of these legacies - spawned by one of the most fertile periods of German thought - for philosophical thinking in the present.

Read more less

El segundo volumen, Del humanismo a Kant, incluye: humanismo y renacimiento; revolución científica; metafísica del racionalismo; evolución del empirismo; cultura ilustrada; Kant y la filosofía trascendental.

Read more less

Kant and Applied Ethics makes an important contribution to Kant scholarship, illuminating the vital moral parameters of key ethical debates. Offers a critical analysis of Kant’s ethics, interrogating the theoretical bases of his theory and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses Examines the controversies surrounding the most important ethical discussions taking place today, including abortion, the death penalty, and same-sex marriage Joins innovative thinkers in contemporary Kantian scholarship, including Christine Korsgaard, Allen Wood, and Barbara Herman, in taking Kant’s philosophy in new and interesting directions Clarifies Kant's legacy for applied ethics, helping us to understand how these debates have been structured historically and providing us with the philosophical tools to address them

Read more less

Kant and Applied Ethics makes an important contribution to Kant scholarship, illuminating the vital moral parameters of key ethical debates. Offers a critical analysis of Kant’s ethics, interrogating the theoretical bases of his theory and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses Examines the controversies surrounding the most important ethical discussions taking place today, including abortion, the death penalty, and same-sex marriage Joins innovative thinkers in contemporary Kantian scholarship, including Christine Korsgaard, Allen Wood, and Barbara Herman, in taking Kant’s philosophy in new and interesting directions Clarifies Kant's legacy for applied ethics, helping us to understand how these debates have been structured historically and providing us with the philosophical tools to address them

Read more less

This is a collection of four essays on aesthetic, ethical, and political issues by Dieter Henrich, the preeminent Kant scholar in Germany today. Although his interests have ranged widely, he is perhaps best known for rekindling interest in the great classical German tradition from Kant to Hegel. The first essay summarizes Henrich's research into the development of the Kant's moral philosophy, focusing on the architecture of the third Critique. Of special interest in this essay is Henrich's intriguing and wholly new account of the relations between Kant and Rousseau. In the second essay, Henrich analyzes the interrelations between Kant's aesthetics and his cognitive theories. His third essay argues that the justification of the claim that human rights are universally valid requires reference to a moral image of the world. To employ Kant's notion of a moral image of the world without ignoring the insights and experience of this century requires drastic changes in the content of such an image. Finally, in Henrich's ambitious concluding essay, the author compares the development of the political process of the French Revolution and the course of classical German philosophy, raise the general question of the relation between political processes and theorizing, and argues that both the project of political liberty set in motion by the French Revolution, and the projects of classical German philosophy remain incomplete.

Read more less

This original and wide-ranging book, now available in paperback, is a major contribution to contemporary philosophy. Bernstein focuses on the work of four key thinkers - Kant, Heidegger, Derrida and Adorno - and provides a powerful new interpretation of their writings on art, aesthetics and politics. Bernstein argues that our experience of art today is conditioned by the loss of the truth-function of art: with the growth of modern science and technological reason, art is relegated to a separate and autonomous domain of the aesthetic. This condition of 'aesthetic alienation' - the raging discord between art and truth - is one of the most perspicuous signs of the fragmentation of modernity. Aesthetic alienation is challenged in differing ways by modern Continental philosophers like Heidegger, Derrida and Adorno. Bernstein shows how each of these philosophers uses the experience of art and the discourse of aesthetics to criticize the fragmentation of modernity. He examines in detail their responses to aesthetic alienation and raises a range of fundamental questions concerning the relations between art, philosophy and politics in modern societies.

Read more less

Is it possible to apply a theoretical approach to ethics? The French philosopher Catherine Chalier addresses this question with an unusual combination of traditional ethics and continental philosophy. In a powerful argument for the necessity of moral reflection, Chalier counters the notion that morality can be derived from theoretical knowledge. Chalier analyzes the positions of two great moral philosophers, Kant and Levinas. While both are critical of an ethics founded on knowledge, their criticisms spring from distinctly different points of view. Chalier reexamines their conclusions, pitting Levinas against (and with) Kant, to interrogate the very foundations of moral philosophy and moral imperatives. She provides a clear, systematic comparison of their positions on essential ideas such as free will, happiness, freedom, and evil. Although based on a close and elegant presentation of Kant and Levinas, Chalier's book serves as a context for the development of the author's own reflections on the question "What am I supposed to do?" and its continued importance for contemporary philosophy.

Read more less

In the space of barely more than five years, with the publication of four pathbreaking books, Slavoj Žižek has earned the reputation of being one of the most arresting, insightful, and scandalous thinkers in recent memory. Perhaps more than any other single author, his writings have constituted the most compelling evidence available for recognizing Jacques Lacan as the preemient philosopher of our time.In Tarrying with the Negative, Žižek challenges the contemporary critique of ideology, and in doing so opens the way for a new understanding of social conflict, particularly the recent outbursts of nationalism and ethnic struggle. Are we, Žižek asks, confined to a postmodern universe in which truth is reduced to the contingent effect of various discursive practices and where our subjectivity is dispersed through a multitude of ideological positions? No is his answer, and the way out is a return to philosophy. This revisit to German Idealism allows Žižek to recast the critique of ideology as a tool for disclosing the dynamic of our society, a crucial aspect of which is the debate over nationalism, particularly as it has developed in the Balkans—Žižek's home. He brings the debate over nationalism into the sphere of contemporary cultural politics, breaking the impasse centered on nationalisms simultaneously fascistic and anticolonial aspirations. Provocatively, Žižek argues that what drives nationalistic and ethnic antagonism is a collectively driven refusal of our own enjoyment.Using examples from popular culture and high theory to illuminate each other—opera, film noir, capitalist universalism, religious and ethnic fundamentalism—this work testifies to the fact that, far more radically than the postmodern sophists, Kant and Hegel are our contemporaries.

Read more less

Commentators on the work of Immanuel Kant have long held that his later "critical" writings are a radical rejection of his earlier, less celebrated efforts. This work demonstrates not only the developmental unity of Kant's individual writings, but also the unity of his work and life experience. The author argues that the central animating issues of Kant's lifework concerned the perplexing relation of spirit to body. Through an analysis of individual writings Shell maps the philosophical contours of Kant's early intellectual struggles and their relation to his more mature thought. The paradox of mind in matter and the tensions it generates - between freedom and determinacy, independence and community, ideal and real - are shown to inform the whole of his work. The author's critique goes further to consider the context of contemporary intellectual life. She explores the fascinating realm of Kant's sexual and medical idiosyncracies, linking them to the primary concerns of his critical philosophy. The work develops a treatment of the connection between Kant's philosophy and his chronic hypochondria, and illuminates connections in a remarkable convergence of life and thought, with theoretical and practical implications for modern times.

Read more less

This book explores Kant's cosmopolitanism and the normative requirements consistent with a Kantian based cosmopolitan constitution. Topics such as cosmopolitan law, cosmopolitan right, the laws of hospitality, a Kantian federation of states, a cosmopolitan epistemology of culture and a possible normative basis for a Kantian form of global distributive justice are explored and defended. Contrary to many contemporary interpretations, Brown considers Kant's cosmopolitan thought as a form of international constitutional jurisprudence that requires minimal legal demands versus the extreme condition of establishing a world state. Viewing Kant's cosmopolitan theory as a minimal form of global jurisprudence allows it to satisfy communitarian, realist and pluralist concerns without surrendering cosmopolitan principles of human worth and cosmopolitan law. In this regard, it provides a more comprehensive understanding of Kantian cosmopolitanism and what normative implications this vision has for contemporary international political theory. Key Features *Outlines the various positions within Kant's cosmopolitanism and examines their interrelated themes and conclusions. *Defends a Kantian cosmopolitan position against its most profound critics *Argues for the contemporary and interdisciplinary relevance of Kant's cosmopolitan thought and its importance for understanding and resolving current global concerns.

Read more less

Romanticism is often understood as an age of extremes, yet it also marks the birth of the modern medium in all senses of the word. Engaging with key texts of the romantic period, the book outlines a wide-reaching project to re-imagine the middle as a constitutive principle. Sng argues that Romanticism dislodges such terms as medium, moderation, and mediation from serving as mere self-evident tools that conduct from one pole to another. Instead, they offer a dwelling in and with the middle: an attention to intervals, interstices, and gaps that make these terms central to modern understandings of relation.

Read more less

In Between Truth and Illusion, Predrag Cicovacki carefully analyzes Kant's contribution to discussions of human being and finds that he was deeply involved in the systematic development of the modern anthropocentric orientation toward liberation and dominance of the subject. On the other hands, modernity's high ideal of universal scientific and moral progress turned out to be illusory and ill-conceived. Cicovacki focuses on Kant's important observations about the limitations of the modernist project and develops an interactive conception of truth from it. Truth, the author says, presupposes a dominance of neither subject nor object, but their dynamic and reciprocal interactive relation. The absence of proper interactions leads to various forms of self-projections or illusions.

Read more less

Immanuel Kant is one of the greatest philosophers in history. As Peter Kreeft here notes, Kant is really two philosophers – a philosopher concerned with how we know things (epistemology) and a philosopher of right and wrong (ethics). If he had written only on either topic, he would still be the most important and influential of the modern philosophers. The combination of the two, though, makes for a formidable thinker, one it would take a figure such as Socrates to confront. Kreeft’s Socrates reflects what the historical philosopher would likely have made of Kant’s ideas, while also recognizing the greatness, genius, and insightfulness of Kant. The result is a helpful, highly readable, even amusing book. Kant’s philosopher of knowing truly is a “Copernican revolution in philosophy,” as he himself dubbed it. His ethics intended to set out the rational grounds for morality. Did he achieve his goals? What would Socrates say about the matter?

Read more less

This book examines the ways that Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy adopt and reconfigure the Kantian understanding of "aesthetic presentation." In Kant, "aesthetic presentation" is understood in a technical sense as a specific mode of experience within a typology of different spheres of experience. This study argues that Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy generalize the elements of this specific mode of experience so that the aesthetic attitude and the vocabulary used by Kant to describe it are brought to bear on things in general. The book goes beyond documenting the well-known influence of Kant's Critique of Judgment, however, to open up a new way of approaching some of the central issues in post-Kantian thought—including why it is that art, the art work, and the aesthetic are still available as a vehicle of critique even, or especially, after Auschwitz. It shows that a genealogy of contemporary theory needs to look at the question of presentation, which has arguably been a question that has worried philosophy from its very beginning.

Read more less

A bold and beautifully written exploration of the “afterlife” of God, showing how apparently secular habits of mind in fact retain the structure of religious thought.Once in the West, our lives were bounded by religion. Then we were guided out of the darkness of faith, we are often told, by the cold light of science and reason. To be modern was to reject the religious for the secular and rational. In a bold retelling of philosophical history, Michael Rosen explains the limits of this story, showing that many modern and apparently secular ways of seeing the world were in fact profoundly shaped by religion.The key thinkers, Rosen argues, were the German Idealists, as they sought to reconcile reason and religion. It was central to Kant’s philosophy that, if God is both just and assigns us to heaven or hell for eternity, we must know what is required of us and be able to choose freely. In trying to live moral lives, Kant argued, we are engaged in a collective enterprise as members of a “Church invisible” working together to achieve justice in history. As later Idealists moved away from Kant’s ideas about personal immortality, this idea of “historical immortality” took center stage. Through social projects that outlive us we maintain a kind of presence after death. Conceptions of historical immortality moved not just into the universalistic ideologies of liberalism and revolutionary socialism but into nationalist and racist doctrines that opposed them. But how, after global wars and genocide, can we retain faith in any conception of shared moral progress and, if not, what is to become of the idea of historical immortality? That is our present predicament. A seamless blend of philosophy and intellectual history, The Shadow of God is a profound exploration of secular modernity’s theistic inheritance.

Read more less

Without Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) there would probably be no modern discipline of 'the philosophy of religion'. Kant's considerable influence has ensured that philosophers, in addressing religious questions, have focused on such issues as arguments for and against the existence of God; the question of immortality; the compatibility of human evil and transcendent goodness; and the relationship between morality and the divine. Many books already explore the nature of his influence. But this one goes further. It argues that Kant's theoretical philosophy, also called 'the critical philosophy', contains resources that have much wider implications than just for Christianity, or for those philosophical issues that relate only to monotheism and its beliefs. For Terry F Godlove, Kant's insights run deeper, and properly applied can help rejuvenate our understanding of the general study of religious thought and its challenges. The author thus bypasses what is usually considered to be 'Kantian philosophy of religion', focusing instead on more fundamental issues: on Kant's account of experience, for example, and on his arguments that human perception of incomplete and finite concepts can nevertheless yield genuine knowledge and insight. Kant and Religion is a subtle and penetrating attempt, by a leading contemporary philosopher of religion, to redefine and reshape the contours of his own discipline through sustained reflection on Kant's so-called 'humanizing project'.

Read more less

This book offers students a philosophical introduction to the ethical foundations of business management. It combines lessons from Kant with virtue ethics and also touches upon additional approaches such as utilitarianism. At the core of the book lies the concept of the nexus of imperfect managerial duty: building and reinforcing the virtuous managerial team, engaging in reasoned discourse among all stakeholders, and diligently pursuing business responsibilities, including the creative efforts necessary for modern organizations.Case illustrations of these applications are presented throughout the book, including chapter appendices. Ancillary videos, test and answer banks and sample syllabi are available online via the author’s website.

Read more less

Kant's Reason develops a novel interpretation of Kant's conception of reason and its philosophical significance. Karl Schafer argues that Kant presents a powerful model for understanding the unity of theoretical and practical reason as two manifestations of a unified capacity for theoretical and practical understanding (or "comprehension"). This model allows us to do justice to the deep commonalities between theoretical and practical rationality, without reducing either to the other. In particular, it enables us to see why the activities of both theoretical and practical reason are governed by a version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, while also seeing why reason is essentially autonomous. At the same time, Kant's Reason reads Kant as presenting a compelling picture of the role that reason, as a capacity or power, should play in a systematic approach to foundational philosophical questions. In doing so, it argues for an account of the fundamental norms that apply to rational beings that treats neither substantive reasons or values nor merely structural rationality as fundamental, but instead provides a robust conception of reason as a power or capacity for theoretical and practical understanding. The result is a form of rational constitutivism, which contrasts both with the forms of reasons fundamentalism that are currently fashionable and the forms of agency-first constitutivism that have dominated Kantian metaethics. In this sense, this volume aims to vindicate Kant's insistence that his philosophy represents nothing more or less than reason's implicit self-understanding coming to explicit and systematic self-consciousness.

Read more less